“Aye, General.” Cooke nearly choked on the sob, some slow, fat tears rolling down his cheeks and into those thick black Dundrearies. “It’s been a hell of a pleasure knowing you, sir! One hell of an honor too. May I shake your hand, General?”
“Of course, Billy Cooke.” Custer did not fight to hide his tears any longer. “You’ve been one of my closest allies all along. I’m going to miss you too.” His eyes gone gray searched each of them out now. “Miss all of you.” Then he gazed back at Cooke. “Remember one thing for me, Lieutenant Cooke …” He waited, clenching his eyes against the pain like a hot poker dragged slowly through his rib cage. “Remember, we’re taking no prisoners this time.”
At first, none of them knew how to take that. Then the general opened his eyes. They seemed to sparkle with some renewed light. It wasn’t only a glistening of tears. Some small flicker of fire still burned bright behind those sapphire eyes.
He was having a rough time breathing. So much pressure on his chest that he wanted to cry out. Instead, he would issue his last orders.
“Spread out. Keep your heads down. And remember, we take no prisoners this trip out.”
Cooke clutched the general’s freckled hand quickly a last time, then was gone up the north slope in a crouch, crabbing in the direction where he would keep an eye on a band of warriors massing down the side of the hill.
God, it looks like better’n a thousand of the heathen bastards down there now, Cooke thought to himself as he skidded through the yellow dust and around stinking bodies.
And out front of them all sat a warrior with light-colored unbraided hair, perched regally atop a prancing horse painted with bloody handprints on its hips, an arrow and a scalp drawn along the neck of the animal. Close enough for Cooke to marvel at the princely bearing of this one.
If I didn’t know better, Billy Cooke thought, he looks grill enough to be a Fifth Royal Lancer, that one!
That solitary warrior sat watching, studying the holdouts upon the rise. As if deciding whether or not to crush such a pitiful last reserve of wasichu soldiers.
“Tom?”
“I’m right here, Autie. Not going to leave you now. Won’t ever leave you, brother.”
Custer reached out for him, his eyes glazed so badly he could barely see. And Tom, his hand was there, holding onto his own with a fierce grip. He fought down the bile that rose with the pressure filling his chest, heavy on his belly.
“G-get me … get me to the top,” Custer gasped. “I’ve got to … just get me to the top.”
“Sure, Autie,” Tom answered, his voice wavering. He glanced up to the top. It was still some fifty feet away. “Should I drag you?”
“Yes …” He winced in more pain, sensing he didn’t have long now. What with the effort it took to speak, to stay conscious. “Just get me to the top.”
Tom Custer stuffed the pistol in his holster, then thought better. He picked up two more Colts from soldiers who wouldn’t be needing them any longer and stuffed them both in his belt. Only then did he lean over and snag both hands around Custer’s collar, beginning to pull him over the summer-cured grass and sage.
Up … up … up the hill.
He wants to be close to the top, Tom kept reminding himself as he dragged the deadweight behind him. Get him to the top. Damn, but you’re heavy, he wanted to complain out loud.
But the exertion was enough. Tom didn’t want to waste his energy in this heat by talking.
Just get Autie to the top of his god … damned … hill.
Late June in Montana Territory.
The hillside ablaze with the splash of tiny flowers and budding blossoms. Across the tall-grass slopes lay scattered patches of locoweed like carpets spread over hardwood floors. So many flowers strewn in wild profusion across the rumpled-bedspread hillsides: pink and rose, lavender and blue, each one sleepily nodding its head at him in the soft June breeze.
Custer knew exactly how they felt. He wanted to go to sleep too … wanted so badly to go to sleep for a long, long time.
But he could smell them. And with their seductive scent, those wildflowers reminded him the time for picking drew near.
Young Indian girls would come up this hillside and gather the sweet peas and buffalo beans, carrying their treasure back down to their camp circles, where they would boil and mash the fruit to be eaten greedily with a tender hump roast.
He could remember those meals, Custer could. Why, even now he could see her as one of those young girls skipping giddily up this slope, with each gay step working her way between the bodies of men or bloated, gassy horse carcasses, completely oblivious—as if death hadn’t opened its fetid bowels and littered itself across this colorful hillside. As if the foul refuse of war really wasn’t here at all to defile this slope where young girls went to play and whisper together about their young lovers down in the villages at the river below.
Flowers all purple and magenta, white and fire orange and a delicate pink. The color of his own skin under this merciless sun. Pink.
He had to make it to the top of the hill. If only Tom could get him there.
Custer turned his head slightly, blinking several times, trying to clear his eyes.
There it was! Right under the edge of bright sky!
Just make it to the top of the ridge, Tom. I’ll be safe there. See everything from up … higher. Keep climbing, Tom. Good, brother! We’re getting close. Get me up there on the ridge where the earth touches the sky. I can see it! Lord, I can see it clearly now—earth as brown as her slim body … rising to meet the sky the way her musky earth-scent breasts rose to meet my lips as I covered her.
That’s it, Tom! Up there where no man has ever gone before … your destiny, Custer. It’s your destiny alone, always has been yours alone to go where no man has trod.
Up just a little higher … higher still … up where I can seize the sky.
Less than twenty of them still breathed on the hill under that hot, merciless sun. Twenty, if you counted the wounded who could still hold a gun.
When Tom Custer, George Yates, and Fresh Smith led the rest of them out of the Medicine Tail and up the slope to that hogback spine of grass-strewn ridge to join with Keogh and Calhoun, there had been something close to two hundred twenty-five soldiers and civilians riding hell-bent for election to cover their asses and get someplace where there weren’t so damned many screaming Indians.
By the time Tom and the rest left James Calhoun and Myles Keogh behind along the ridge, Custer had with him about a hundred and twelve stragglers limping onto that last hill north along the hogback.
After Smith’s men had slaughtered themselves in the ravine and the lieutenant himself struggled to crawl back to the general’s position, there were about sixty soldiers left, grim-lipped and squint-eyed, to stare back down the slope at the warriors closing the noose. Time and again their fierce, resolute little ring tightened round the general’s command. Each of those still alive by some cruel twist of fate’s own sleight of hand, understood by now that none of them were walking out of this valley.
No man found breath to joke about riding out either. A couple of men had tried that earlier. Corporal Foley and another.
Harrington, Tom thought. Maybe it was him. Haven’t seen the man in a long time.
Both riders had succeeded in getting off a ways, each followed by warriors on ponies fresh and spirited for the chase. Then each soldier shot himself in the head before the warriors could catch them alive.